From high school to college

After graduating from high school and beginning a major in STEM fields at campuses across the country, demographics in classrooms grow increasingly worse for females as they proceed along the pipeline in college.

Biology major Samantha Hoffman (‘13) walks into the seminar room for her Computational and Mathematical Engineering (CME) class at Stanford University. What strikes her as odd is the composition of teaching assistants for the class.

“For both my CME classes, 100 percent of the TAs were male,” she said.

Hoffman, who plans to add a sub-concentration in neurobiology and a minor in creative writing, views the TA imbalance as an important issue to fix, due to female mentorship’s importance in encouraging female participation in STEM fields. Various organizations at Stanford, including She++ and Women in CS (WiCS), have been started in order to combat existing social barriers against women.

“The biggest problem is getting mentors, because without mentors, you can’t really get your advice. You can’t really get those connections to help you move forward in the industry,” Hoffman said. “In big companies, leadership [consists of] only one out of five or one out of ten women depending on what industry you’re in, and so you have to get change started there.”

As former Upper School Math Department Chair and Middle School division head, as well as a math teacher at other public and private schools, Head of Academics Jennifer Gargano stresses the importance of teachers as role models and guides. Throughout her study of math education during college, she was encouraged by professors who assumed she would go on to earn a master’s degree even before she had planned to.

“It’s the teachers that really have so much power in terms of turning students onto a course that they thought they may not have interest in, or keep them loving a subject, too,” she said. “I think it’s all about the teachers.”

Finding a mentor for women in the worlds of academia can prove challenging on campuses like Stanford, where only three out of 54 of the CS department’s full-time faculty members are women, as the Winged Post discovered by counting the department’s faculty on its website directory.

Sean Treichler, a male summer teacher and past teaching assistant for Stanford University’s CS143 course in compilers, said he was confident that rectifying the gender balance in faculty was a continued goal during recruitment.

“A significant challenge on this front is that the gender mix for new Ph.D.s in CS seems to be lagging [in the number of women], so demand [for female faculty] will constantly exceed supply,” he wrote in an email interview.